Dressing Like a Nica

In my house we have two cute little fluffy  almost white dogs, Dogi and Bobi, who like nothing better than pulling my clothes off the line and eating them.  I have rescued shirts and underpants that were dirty by the time I got to them, but not ruined.  My luck changed about a month ago. I woke up from a nap and went out to check on the progress of the clothes drying outside.  My jeans were hanging on the line looking a little dirty, but when I checked on them I found a hole the size of washcloth eaten out of the seat.  Candida had found them on the ground and hung them up, somehow not noticing the huge hole.  She was horrified when she saw what the dogs had done and had several suggestions, among them sewing the edges together, which would have left no room for my butt, and sewing a patch on the seat which even she had to admit would be hard to miss as I walked down the street.  No, there was nothing to do but buy a new pair of jeans.

The ruined jeans were my first pair of Nica jeans.  I had bought them for the outrageous price of $27. at a mall in Managua with the assistance of a younger volunteer who had scoped out the mall stores and knew where I could go.  I bought this first pair because the two pairs I had from home were much too big, I’m happy to say.  But when you make $200 a month, $27 is a big bite.  So I asked my counterparts and they told me where I could go locally to buy jeans for a better price.  I spent an hour trying them on, an ordeal just as bad in Nicaragua as in the States, worse because it’s hot work on a hot afternoon and because the dressing room is a space behind a door, but I found a good pair for half the Managua price, nice skinny stove-pipe legged jeans, dark blue.  They’re made in China, but what isn’t.  They bleed when washed, but they don’t bleed when dry. And I fit right in, now, with Nica women for whom tight jeans are a uniform, although mine are not tight all the way to the ankles as is the norm.

But Dogi and Bobi struck again.  Somehow they got out of their pen unobserved, streaked through my room and grabbed the top item in my laundry bag, which just happened to be one of the two bras I have that fit. I brought 5 to Nicaragua but they don’t fit any more.  My sister came to the rescue with 2 new bras, but that means I’m always washing one while wearing the other. The bra was discovered the next day in the dogs’ pen, torn to shreds. Candida, who never throws anything out and is forever optomistic, suggested hopefully that maybe I could sew it, but a serious look revealed how impossible that would be. 

Bras are a fashion statement here.  (Are they in the US?) They are to be seen either through a blouse or their straps are color co-ordinated with a top. You can buy them anywhere, in pulperias along with eggs and cheese and beans. So, clearly unable to operate with only one remaining U.S. bra, I went shopping at two local local pulperias.  At the first I was disconcerted to find that one of my students, a little 12 year old girl, waited on me.  She wasn’t at all embarrassed to show me what she had in my size (medium by U.S. standards but big here in Nicaragua where I tower over most women and many men). Unfortunately there wasn’t much, only one actually, a purple number with big baby blue circles on it. “Nothing in white or beige?”  I asked, not really in the Nica spirit.  No, she said sadly.  She would have liked to sell her teacher a bra.

 I hit the next pulperia and was waited on by the owner, a man who seemed a little worried about showing me his stock of bras.   But he put all of them on the counter along with a plastic bag.  I should help myself.  The closest thing I could find to beige or white in my size (really in any size) was a lemon yellow number.  I reasoned, most un-Nica-ly, that yellow might not show through most of my clothes and I asked the price.  Thirty cordobas, about a dollar and a half.  So I bought it.

The bra is a little low on quality. But the price is right.  It, too, was made in China. I am amazed to think of countries like China not only making clothes for first world countries like the U.S. but third world countries, too, the quality a little shakey but the price unbeatable. 

So thanks to Dogi and Bobi, I’m starting to look as much like a native as a gringa can here.  I’ve replaced a good deal of my original wardrobe with cheap ropas americanas shirts, at 50 cents to a dollar per shirt.  I have Nica hair ornaments to hold back and up my longer hair.  Only my shoes and my skin betray me.  And my hair color.  Despite suggestions from Nica friends that I might want to try to dye my hair to get rid of the gray (women of all ages here dye their hair; rarely do you see a gray haired old person), I’ve had no trouble resisting that idea.

The transformation is on-going.  I find myself in the pulperias, having bought tomatoes or eggs, lingering over the jewelry offered for sale, eying the big colorful plastic hoop earrings, the long dangles, the red or pink disks the size of can lids. Might just have to ante up the 10 cordobas to complete the look.

I'm attaching a picture of Smith, featured in my last blog entry.